David Audley is an unlikely spy. True, he works for England's Ministry of Defense, but strictly as a back-room man, doing meticulous research on the Middle East. This new assignment, then, comes as something of a surprise: A WWII-era British cargo place has been discovered at the bottom of a drained lake, complete with the dead pilot and not much else. Why are the Soviets so interested in the empty plane and its pilot?interested enough to attend the much-belated funeral? And why has Audley been tapped to lead the investigation? As Audley chips away at the first question, he can't stop asking the second. Could he possibly have been given the assignment in order to fail, to preserve the decades-old secrets at the bottom of the lake? If that's the case, someone's made an error. Audley's a scholas by training, temperamentally allergic to loose ends. And the story he unravels is going to make some people very uncomfortable indeed.